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When I come across an abandoned house, especially one as nice as this one once was, it makes me wonder what happened. Why did they just up and leave, abandoning their home? I know why barns are abandoned. Old barns just aren’t useful for modern farmers any longer and they’re more trouble to maintain than they’re worth.

This looks like it was a pretty nice house, and it looks like it was still lived in and maintained until not too long ago. So what happened? One’s imagination starts to work, conjuring up all kinds of stories to try to explain why a family might abandon a house. I start thinking about the people who built it originally, the family it was made for. Once upon a time this was someone’s dream, a lovely brick house they could raise their family in. Well made, secure. Warm and snug against the Wisconsin winters. And now here it is, abandoned, slowly rotting away.

Why? What happened?

I need to do B&W more often. The original images were done in color and they just didn’t convey the mood I was looking for.

When I take an image I don’t usually fiddle with it afterwards. I don’t fire up PhotoShop and start tweaking things. For some reason it feels like, oh, cheating, I suppose. It’s silly, really. Pretty much every photo you see published is tweaked in one way or another. Colors are enhanced, lighting is altered, imperfections are removed. Tweaking photos has a long, long history, going back to the start of film photography. We used filters and processing tricks, did dodging and burning in when making prints. I did it routinely when I was processing and printing my own photos back in the days of film, so I don’t know why I’m reluctant to do it now.